


persona

by shcherbatskayas



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eating Disorders, Gun Violence, Modeling, Obsessive Behavior, Psychological Horror, Social Media, Stalking, Suicide, Tsumugi's existence is implied
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 09:16:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21134312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shcherbatskayas/pseuds/shcherbatskayas
Summary: In which there are more Junkos than there ought to be.





	persona

**Author's Note:**

> presented sans commentary, because any explanation that i could give would be borderline incomprehensible.

The best part about being nineteen, Junko decides, is that she doesn’t have to pretend to care about school anymore. She can relax on a Wednesday evening without having to set up her desk for a perfect Instagram post, fussing to get the books and pens in the right order before posting a picture with a caption like _play hard, study hard!_ and the right string of emojis. Instead, her nightly post can be a picture of her pedicured feet on a stool next to a bottle of champagne, and the caption can be _everyone needs some me time_ and an even more perfect string of emojis. An easy, almost-honest thing. Just how Junko likes it. 

Once the photo is taken and posted, Junko kicks the bottle to the floor. It doesn’t break, but instead rolls away under the couch. She doesn’t like champagne, but it’s very important to _seem_ like someone who likes champagne, so she keeps a few bottles around. Sometimes they break when she kicks them, but sometimes they just roll away and turn up like exotic dinosaur bones. 

She’s never excited when she finds them. 

Junko looks at the caption again and determines that it’s probably the most dishonest thing about the post. She doesn’t take _me time_. Or, at least, not in the typical way that people are supposed to. Her me time begins now, when she starts running numbers in her head about the post’s success. The foot fetish people will go wild for it, she’s sure. Junko’s found at least two accounts solely dedicated to her feet, something she laughs about sometimes when she thinks about it too much. That’ll bring in a few followers. And the normal fans will like it, make some comments about the pretty lighting from the thirty-second floor of the Tokyo Hills Tower or her taste in nail polish colors. Some random accounts, too, will come for it, see the caption and agree that yeah, everyone _does_ need some me time and that probably includes them, too. 

So, all in all, she predicts about 3,000 likes before she goes to bed. Not bad. Not her best, but not bad. It’ll be good for when she petitions to get that blue checkmark again, anyhow. She’s so close to it that she can almost taste it. She just needs a couple thousand more followers and it’ll be done, a more concrete proof of her celebrity status. 

Not that Junko will beg, of course. Her celebrity needs to be effortless. She spends a lot of time twisting her image this way and that, but there’s always one consistent factor in it: she never looks like she’s trying. Junko knows that nobody cares for a tryhard model, and so she’s very careful to look effortless at all times. She isn’t trying now and has never tried before. Life has always come to her so, so easily. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar. 

Switch apps, switch accounts. Junko keeps six sockpuppets, each one designed to follow a different part of her own fans, positive and negative. It’s important to see what they’re up to, what they’re thinking about her. If they’re happy. She’s had her fair amount of success in Asia these last couple of years, but she’s never going to make it out into the full international circuit like she wants to without a dedicated fanbase. Tokyo Fashion Week has happened for Junko every year since she’s turned fourteen, but Paris will be out of the question if her fans are unhappy with her. 

Scroll, scroll, scroll. Her own face is in front of her a thousand times. The TodayInJunko account has posted a picture from three years ago, when Junko was in her second year at Hope’s Peak. In the photo, her face is pressed against Maizono’s and she’s smiling supernaturally wide. That was right after the toothpaste commercial, so Junko had to show off those pearly whites every damn chance she got. Lots of smiles, smiles, smiles in that month. She remembers rubbing her jaw at the end of the day, irritable and exhausted with all of the smiling. 

(Was that six month before she gave up on the idea of ending the world, or was it five? The exact date eludes Junko at the moment, mainly because it’s hard to pinpoint the exact day she gave up. It had happened slowly, and Junko was grateful for it. The apocalypse was _so_ 2012, and she really was going to try and make it happen in 2016. Embarrassing.) 

More scrolling. All seems like it’s normal in the land of Japanese celebrity. Her own fan accounts are preoccupied with discourse about Junko’s _Non-No_ photoshoot from a few months ago, but it’s not the sort of discourse she needs to be worried about, just about whether one of the shots was a wig or just Junko’s hair on its own. It’s calm and easy, but Junko still likes to keep tabs. 

She spends an hour or so checking in, and once she has the data she needs, Junko knows that she should get up to get her notebook and write down her stats. It’s the routine, and Junko is good about sticking to her routine. But she’s so damn comfortable here on the couch. She sighs, snuggles in deeper, and kicks aimlessly at the air before refreshing. 

Another picture of her. It’s definitely her, but Junko doesn’t recognize the photo. She’s in a black, floor-length dress with a slit up the left leg, something she was keeping for a red carpet but hasn’t broken out yet. She hasn’t broken it out yet, but there she is, on a red carpet with that dress, posing as well as she always poses. 

The caption, from ModelWorldJapan: _Junko Enoshima at the premier of Spaceriders. April 17th, 2019_

Junko wasn’t invited to the Spaceriders red carpet, and Junko isn’t there. That can only mean one thing. 

Mukuro’s phone rings twice before she answers, and Mukuro whispers a suspiciously sleepy “Hello?” into the phone. It’s not Mukuro’s imitation of Junko’s voice, which pisses her off for all of a second. 

“Mukuro! You’re such a bad sister!” She complains half-heartedly into the phone. 

“I—Uh, what did I...I didn’t think I...What did I do wrong?” 

“Uh, you’re in town and didn’t tell me!” Junko explains. “What kind of sister wouldn’t tell another sister when she was in the city, huh? We haven’t had sister time in like, ever! Ditch the red carpet and come see me!”

“...Junko, I’m in Abu Dhabi.” Mukuro says it slowly, as if she’s uncertain whether she’ll be believed. That’s not how Mukuro lies normally, but she could finally be trying a double bluff. Maybe her hopeless older sister isn’t so hopeless after all.

“Haha, very funny,” Junko says. It’s toneless, but something. “I just saw a picture of you dressed up as me at this red carpet! I haven’t worn the Louis yet, so it’s a perfect pick. You’ve gotten better at this.”

“Junko, I’m not kidding. I’m in Abu Dhabi,” she repeats. Before Junko can say something about that, Mukuro switches to a video call and there she is, definitely herself and definitely not in Japan. 

“Shit,” Junko says eloquently. “Must be a fan prank, then. Or a hell of a photo edit. Didn’t strike ModelWorld as the type for that, but the world’s full of surprises.”

“Yeah. Uh, I have to run, but can I call you sometime tomorrow? I really miss you.” Mukuro looks away from the phone, embarrassed to admit to an emotion. 

“I miss you, too. And call me tomorrow! I don’t have much on my plate, so I can definitely make time,” Junko tells her. She waves and then hangs up. 

Refresh again. More pictures, different accounts. They’re too good, too consistent to be edits, or maybe they had just gotten better at editing. Might’ve hired a few professionals for this prank. Junko figures that it’s fair, though. She’s played a few little pranks on them, so they’re probably inclined to play a prank back. Something subtle and sneaky. Something like this. 

(It disturbs her that she missed out on the planning. That Junko didn’t see it with all of her sharpness and vigilance. That something, anything, slipped through her grasp.)

She chuckles. Not because she finds it particularly funny, but because she needs to convince herself that’s how she feels. Then Junko gets up and logs it all before going to bed. 

***

The post does better than she anticipated. 15,000 likes, 1,000 comments, all saying that her little joke of pretending to be at home was very funny. 

It’s morning, and Junko still doesn’t feel particularly amused.

***

Sunday afternoon is the worst. Junko paces restlessly and unpacks her groceries, something she still does herself just to see people do double takes as she stalks down the aisles. She unpacks one bag at a time to slow the process down, drag it out as long as she can so that she has a task to do. Sundays offer nothing, and the nothingness they offer makes her sick. Not even the fan accounts are as busy, so she has nothing to check up on. Nothing to do, nothing to do. 

Eggs and yogurt go in the fridge. She grabbed strawberry this time because cherry blossom season is in full bloom, so everything and everyone is pink. Junko needs to keep up with it. Keep up with it and be ahead, so she grabbed a few cups of mango yogurt that she got because that will be next. They’re in a different bag, probably. 

Bananas go in the fruit basket, hung perfectly by the kitchen window to get a summer aesthetic photo. They were expensive and Junko doesn’t even particularly like them, but she’ll do what’s necessary for the photo. They look alright there, but she grabs her phone and pulls out the camera to check and there’s a burst of notifications that shouldn’t be there. 

She opens them up. There’s Twitter and there’s a tweet she made, _getting groceries is the best part of sunday_. Except Junko never made that tweet. She didn’t use any social media before heading out the door, not even a check. But it’s pulling in likes, this thing she never said, this banal look into her life. 

It wouldn’t be hard, she guesses, to find out that she does her grocery shopping on Sundays. Anyone around her building would know, and this isn’t her first time people have checked up on her. 

(She doesn’t call it _stalking_. It’s not _stalking_ because she’s not hiding that she’s going grocery shopping. They don’t need to snoop around for it. They’re just _checking up_. It’s not malicious. Junko can’t allow herself to be the victim of anything malicious, and so it’s not. It’s just checking up.) 

This isn’t unusual in theory. What’s unusual is the practice, that they accessed her main Twitter account and let her know she was being looked at. That’s never happened before. Maybe it’s just another prank, or an attempt from someone else’s agency to see what they can do. It starts with Sunday groceries, sure, but it could end with some discourse that could seriously bring her name down. 

So Twitter support it is. She sits on her counter, fills out a complaint, and then places it face down. Fifty likes so far, five replies. They’re going to keep racking up, and Junko doesn’t want to look at it. She doesn’t know why, but she just _doesn’t_. 

Besides, there’s still more groceries to unpack. The dried peas, nuts, and oatmeal all go in the pantry. The avocados go in the refrigerator. 

***

Twitter finds nothing. An intern promised Junko that they’re looking into it, but they turn up with a blank as to who and from where that Tweet was posted. 

The next day, there’s a blue checkmark next to her name. A consolation, she supposes. 

The day after, there’s one on Instagram, too. 

Junko says nothing of it, but there’s a sick satisfaction in her chest, the same one that would rise there when she was younger and would get hurt on purpose just to have Mukuro dote on her. _All’s well that ends well_, she thinks as she writes it down in her log, but there’s a sneaking suspicion that what ends well isn’t over yet. It comes from nothing, but it’s there. 

No amount of logging puts the feeling to rest. 

*** 

Photoshoots are probably Junko’s favorite part of modeling, all things considered. It’s not so much the process that she likes, or the photographers, or anything like that, but it’s the after effect. There’s something dreamy and magical about seeing herself in magazines, on poster boards, in advertisements on her own feed. It’s a little addicting, almost like the wild pills some of her coworkers take to maintain their perfect figures. Junko is blessed with a good metabolism and a mild enough dash of anorexia that she doesn’t need to take them; she can find her highs elsewhere. And as for the disorder, it’s more functional than anything. Besides, it could be a great point in her biography come fifty years from now, when she’ll be too old to model much of anything but definitely old and famous enough to write a biography. 

She doesn’t have to fancy herself up to go to photoshoots. They’ll do the fancying for her. All Junko needs is her usual fare and to arrive on her motorcycle in a decent enough time. 

When Junko arrives to the Kanebo branch officer where she’s to pose with bottles of face cream like she adores them, the building is closed. She approaches the gray, anonymous tower and its glass doors and taps on them. 

No response. 

She whips out her phone and calls Hiroka at lighting speed. 

“Hey, what the hell?” She says in way of a greeting. “Nobody’s here!”  
“Junko, everyone’s here,” she says calmly. “Where are you?”

“Uh, at the Kanebo branch, like I’m supposed to be.” Junko places a hand on her hip and presses her phone closer. 

“Oh, don’t you remember? We moved it! I got a call from you yesterday and you left a voicemail saying—”

“I didn’t call you yesterday,” she interrupts, something that almost felt like fear bubbling up in her chest. “How the hell did you get a voicemail from me when I didn’t call you yesterday?”

“I’m sure that you did, but it’s not anything to worry about!” Hiroka sounds as frantic as Junko feels, desperate to keep her from getting angry. Junko is feeling something more ominous. “Here, I’ll text you the address. What do you want me to tell them happened?”

“Traffic,” she spits out, and she ends the call before Hiroka can say anything else.

Junko breaks more laws than she cares to count on her way there, but she arrives fashionably late. She plops herself down in the stylist’s chair and lets her hair gets fussed with, moves her face as ordered, submits herself to the process of it all. 

Hiroka floats on by, and Junko reaches out and grabs her wrist. “Let me see your phone,” she orders. 

Without a question, Hiroka hands it over and lingers nearby, uncertain. Junko finds her call history and sure as shit, there’s Junko’s contact info under Recents. She messes around with it until she finds the voicemail, and Junko hits play. 

It’s her own voice that comes out of the speakers. Not anyone else’s imitation of it, not Mukuro’s near perfect attempts or the joking exaggeration of late night comedy hosts, but _hers_. 

(Someone out there can get her voice down cold, and Junko doesn’t even know who.) 

***

So the motherfucker needs to be caught. She comes to the decision fairly easily, and that could make a good narrative, too. Brave Junko Enoshima, dealing with this crazy bitch all by herself. The toughest girl in all of Japan, and she does it while smiling and flouncing around and posing for photos. The publicity would be amazing. 

The problem is that Junko doesn’t have a single lead. 

This piece of shit could maybe be someone close to her. Hiroka’s been her agent for nearly six years, so she’s a good candidate. There’s a few fellow models that could be trying it, too, lower level ones. And, of course, there are always the fans. Junko remembers some of the creepier ones, the ones that tried to sneak into her apartment and steal her panties or the ones that would wait outside of her building for hours, undeterred by building security. There are no hints on any of their known accounts, and Junko can read them pretty well. Junko can read everyone pretty well. She’s Junko fucking Enoshima, and she’s stuck. 

Stuck! Junko Enoshima, stuck! It feels like some sort of sick joke. 

Mukuro. She could maybe call Mukuro. It’s easier to think when she has someone to bounce ideas off of, and there’s no one better at bouncing than Mukuro. 

But the phone. There’s no way the phone isn’t compromised, so Junko screams into a pillow and then picks the damnable thing up. 

“I’ll find you,” she says to the screen. “I’ll find you like you’ve found me.”

And then she promptly, fearlessly, hurls it against the wall. 

(It doesn’t make her feel better.)

***

Until there’s an idea, Junko decides that the best thing she can do is go about her life as she always has. No use in making herself miserable about it. They’ll slip up eventually, too. No one is as perfect and precise as her, and so they’ll slip and Junko will catch their slip and then things can return to semi-normal. 

She eats less, though. Junko isn’t too hungry anymore, and she loses weight fast. A blessing for her career, really. And if the new crack on her phone is noticed, no one says anything about it. They’re all unobservant and stupid and useless, these people here at the beginning phase of her celebrity. 

And yet she puts up with them, and after getting another interview with some medium-sized television show, she goes back to her apartment. 

First, a silly little post about how great the interview was. A thing she doesn’t feel, but fakes with the ease that she fakes most of her emotions. Then she collapses face-first onto her bed and intends to stay there for the rest of eternity. 

Until. 

The door to her bedroom opens, and Junko gets herself turned around and facing it fast enough that she damn near falls off the bed. Staring at her is a mirror image of herself, but it’s not her. Junko is right here, and there’s no mirror there. Besides, this person, this Not-Junko, is standing up. Not-Junko is wearing a different one of her outfits. Not-Junko is looking at her with a familiar sort of blankness, though, and that’s disturbing. Someone knows her dullness, too. 

“Who the fuck are you?” Junko asks, getting up and stepping towards them. 

“Who the fuck are you?” They reply mildly, with a cutesy tilt of the chin. 

Junko points her perfectly-manicured fingernail into their chest. “I’m Junko Enoshima, who the _fuck_ are you?”

Not-Junko smiles. “I’m Junko Enoshima.”

“No, you’re not. You’re fucking crazy,” Junko declares. 

“I’m the you that you were always meant to be . The you that didn’t give up on Despair.”

It’s odd to hear the word from someone else’s mouth. Backwards. Not right. Every bit of that was destroyed. She dealt with it. No knows about that. No one can know. Junko shoves them into the wall, and they just smile, utterly delighted. 

“Get the fuck out of my apartment!” She shrieks, and then turns to get her phone. Call security. Get this fucking creep out of her apartment and— 

And Not-Junko tackles her to the ground with ease. Something cold is pressed to her forehead, and Junko recognizes it as the barrel of a gun. This crazy bitch has a gun. 

“How did you find out about Despair, huh?” She asks, her face pressed against the carpet. Once this is dealt with, Junko is going to have to retrace their steps, get rid of any extra evidence that she left behind. Let no one else walk this trail again. Let no one else get this close. 

“That’s not important, really,” they say. “What’s important is that I’m starting it back up. You were right before, you know. It’s disappointing that you gave up on it.”

“I was out of my mind,” Junko counters. “You’re out of your mind. Look, if you’re a fan or something, you can have—”

“I’m not here for that. I might have been before, but I’m not here for that now. I’m here to kill you and take your place.”

They say it very simply. Coldly. Junko has seen nothingness behind her own eyes, but this person is more than nothingness; they’re straight void. Only now does Junko know fear. It’s nothing like Despair, really. It’s more animal, and it freezes her solid. 

“People will be able to tell,” Junko says. “I’m not going to lie, you’re good, but I have fans more dedicated than you can imagine. They’ll be able to tell that—”

“They haven’t been able to tell so far. You only figured it out a month or so ago, and I’ve been at this for a year.”

Junko’s heart knows they must be lying. They must be. There’s no way that Junko could have missed that, but the stranger lets her up, gun still pointed at her. She scans their face for lies and finds nothing. _Nothing_.

“My sister!” Junko shrieks. “My sister will be able to tell, and she’ll fucking kill you. Whatever she’ll do to you will be far worse than anything you’ve read that I wanted to do, I can promise you that.”

“An interesting theory,” Not-Junko says. “Let’s test it out. Oh, and be quiet, won’t you? I’d rather you not interrupt.”

Still pointing the gun at her, Not-Junko gets up and grabs the phone. Junko stays quiet. Mukuro is smart enough to figure this out and deal with it. If there’s no one on this earth that Junko has, she has her sister. Her sister will know. 

The phone rings, and the silence between each ring is deafening. Junko will not die here; there’s still Paris Fashion Week, and New York, and she still hasn’t dated a movie star or a Youtuber of notable size. There’s still so much for her to accomplish, and so it won’t end like this. No, it won’t. 

Mukuro answers. “Hello?”

“Hey!” Not-Junko croons into the phone. “I’ve got a question.”

“What is it?”

Junko can’t hear any suspicion in her voice. So far, she seems to genuinely think that it’s her, that this son of a bitch is the real Junko. 

“When are you going to come to Japan? I have to go to China in two weeks, and I don’t want to miss you when you’re here.”

This stranger shouldn’t have known about the China thing. It was a simple photo shoot, really, but it was kept under wraps. It was going to be a surprise. It was going to expose her to a bigger market. It was going to be a _move_, and yet here they are, knowing all about it. 

Mukuro pauses. “Um, I don’t think I’ll be able to come anytime soon. Things over here got way worse, and—”

“Aw! Mukuro, are you sure?” The whining note is familiar, something that Junko has used on her a thousand times. It’s wrong to hear it so perfectly come out of someone else’s mouth. 

“I’ll book a flight out of here tomorrow,” she promises, and Not-Junko grins, victorious. 

“Thanks! Love you!” 

“Love you too.”

And then it’s over. Over. This person has become her so well that not even her twin can separate them. Junko looks at the gun still pointed at her and then looks at the person in front of her.

“You won’t make it as me for more than two months,” she says. “Your roots are blue, and mine are black.”

“Hair dye damage,” they say breezily. Fuck. 

“And your eyes? Those are definitely contacts, and I’ve never had those.”

With their free hand, they mime putting a phone up to their ear. “Hiroka, you’ll never _believe_ what the eye doctor told me today!”

“You’re skinnier than me. Probably a centimeter taller, too.”

Undeterred, they head to her closet and pull out the lifts that Junko occasionally puts in her shoes. The lifts that would make her the same size as this stranger. And a model losing weight? That’s as common as the sun rising. 

She will not scream. Junko will not scream. She inhales through her nose and tries something else. “You may know everything about the outside of my life, but you can’t be me! You don’t know what it’s like inside of my head, and that drives _everything_. You won’t last.”

“If the outside is the same, does the inside really matter?” They ask. “If I live your life with all of the outside actions, won’t my inner world turn right into yours soon enough? Except mine will be better. Mine will be what yours ought to be. You should have never given up on Despair, you know. It’s really a shame that you did. I thought it would’ve been fun.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Junko screams. “Just shut the fuck up!” 

“I’d rather not,” they say. 

It’s quiet. The gun is still pointed at her. She gets an idea: this piece of shit can’t be Junko Enoshima if everyone thinks that Junko Enoshima is dead, and the window isn’t far off. The window isn’t far off at all, and the safety on that gun is on. 

Junko didn’t think her death would be like this, but here it is. Here’s her death, and she’s rushing towards it with a freight train force. She glares up at this stranger, spits at them, and then makes a run for the window while they fuck around with the safety. With how many people are out and about, there’s no way that they’ll miss it. Everyone will see, and everyone will know, and this stranger will be defeated. If Junko has to die for that to happen, so be it, but she’ll die the winner. Really, that’s the most important thing. 

When she breaks through the glass, though, a thought occurs to her: This stranger could jump after her. This stranger could have gotten their teeth fixed to be just like hers. They might not be able to tell the bodies apart in the end. She could end up being the one not buried as Junko Enoshima. In death, they might be a more convincing Junko than she ever was. 

But she’s falling now. It’s too late to change that. It’s too late to wonder. She closes her eyes and turns herself towards the ground so that she doesn’t have to know if the stranger jumps after her. It would be better not to know, so that she can die with the false taste of victory on her tongue. So that when she slams into the concrete below, she does it as infallible.


End file.
